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Uncultivated field boundaries constitute a significant part of the remaining semi-natural habitat in simplified agricultural landscapes, providing habitats for many grassland species. In Europe, agri-environment schemes (AES) offer incentives to farmers to manage farmland more environmentally friendly. In Sweden, one AES has specifically targeted management of incidental habitats on farmland by pr
Making decisions between alternatives are challenging when there is weak or unreliable knowledge about the risks and benefits of the alternatives. This requires a trade-off between risks (and benefits). Here, we comment on a recent paper on risk–risk trade-offs and highlight the difficulties of making such trade-offs when the available evidence is of different strength. One current example of a ri
Mass-flowering crops (MFCs) are increasingly cultivated and might influence pollinator communities in MFC fields and nearby semi-natural habitats (SNHs). Across six European regions and 2 years, we assessed how landscape-scale cover of MFCs affected pollinator densities in 408 MFC fields and adjacent SNHs. In MFC fields, densities of bumblebees, solitary bees, managed honeybees and hoverflies were
Plant-feeding insects reduce yields substantially in all major crops despite considerable crop protection efforts. A lack of long-term monitoring data and insufficient ecological knowledge of pest insects limit our possibilities to characterize drivers of change in their abundances. We demonstrate how a suite of complementary methods and data sources can be used to analyse historical shifts in pes
Catalytic processes have tremendous importance in our everyday life. Most chemicals, pharmaceuticals, plastics etc. are, in fact, produced with the help of catalysts. What is probably even more important is that the toxic wastes produced in great amounts by modern factories and plants are recycled or transformed into less poisonous substances by means of catalytic units. One example from our everyThe present work is devoted to atomic scale structural studies of the surfaces of model heterogeneous catalysts relevant to oxidation reactions. A novel approach using high-energy surface X-ray diffraction combined with mass-spectrometry measurements is employed to perform in situ structural characterization of Pd(100) and Pd(553) single crystal surfaces acting as catalysts in the process of CO ox
Honeybees might outcompete wild bees by depleting common resources, possibly more so in simplified landscapes where flower-rich habitats have been lost. We tested this by experimentally adding honeybee hives to nine sites while ensuring that ten additional sites were free from hives. The landscape surrounding each geographically separated site either held low (homogeneous landscape) or high (heter
Increasing landscape complexity can enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services in agroecosystems. However, policies based on conversion of arable land into semi-natural habitats to increase landscape complexity and ecosystem services can be difficult to implement. Although it appears to be a promising management option, nothing is known about the effect of increasing landscape diversity through c
Today's intensive farming practices are known to have affected farmland biodiversity negatively in many different ways. As far as birds are concerned, they are known to have suffered during both summer and winter. Relatively little is known about the effects on birds during migration. We studied the stopover ecology of the Eurasian golden plover Pluvialis apricaria, a species listed in EU Birds Di
Weeds constitute major constraints for farmers by reducing crop yield and quality. However, weeds are managed effectively using herbicides, but this may cause harmful effects on human health and the environment. In an experiment on weed seed predation, we tested the biological control potential of carabid beetles to combat weeds in the absence of herbicides. Seeds from three common weed species we
Understanding the relationships between trait diversity, species diversity and ecosystem functioning is essential for sustainable management. For functions comprising two trophic levels, trait matching between interacting partners should also drive functioning. However, the predictive ability of trait diversity and matching is unclear for most functions, particularly for crop pollination, where in
P>1. Environmental changes may not always result in rapid changes in species distributions, abundances or diversity. In order to estimate the effects of, for example, land-use changes caused by agri-environment schemes (AES) on biodiversity and ecosystem services, information on the time-lag between the application of the scheme and the responses of organisms is essential. 2. We examined the effec
The negative effect of agricultural intensification on bumblebee populations is thought to partly be caused by loss of food plants, for example because of increased field size and concomitant loss of non-crop field borders and their nectar and pollen plants. Earlier studies have focused on how loss of foraging resources affects colony growth and thereby abundance of workers and sexual reproduction
Although climate is known to play an important role in structuring biological communities, high-resolution analyses of recent climatic impacts on multiple components of diversity are still sparse. Additionally, there is a lack of knowledge about which species drive community response to environmental change. We used a long-term breeding bird data set that encompasses a large latitudinal and altitu
Natural enemies such as predatory arthropods and parasitoids have the potential to suppress pest species and provide the ecosystem service biological control. When predicting the potential of biological control in agriculture it is important to give evidence on how agricultural management influence the abundance and functions of the natural enemies. In this study we examined whether managements pr
Research relating to ecosystem services has increased, partly because of drastic declines in biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. However, the mechanistic linkages between land use, biodiversity and service provision are poorly understood and synthesized. This is particularly true for many ecosystem services provided by mobile organisms such as natural enemies to crop pests. These species are
Bumblebee communities and their foraging resources were surveyed in south Swedish agricultural landscapes of contrasting complexity, defined by the size of arable fields and the amount of permanent grazed pastures. After the flowering of oilseed rape (OSR), simplified landscapes contained substantially less herbaceous flower resources and a lower proportion of perennials, compared to complex ones.
Although much attention has focused on the diversity of plant mating systems, only a few studies have considered the joint effects of mating system and sexual conflict in plant evolution. In mixed-mating Collinsia heterophylla, a sexual conflict over timing of stigma receptivity is proposed: pollen with a capacity to induce early onset of stigma receptivity secures paternity for early-arriving pol
Insect pollination, despite its potential to contribute substantially to crop production, is not an integrated part of agronomic planning. A major reason for this are knowledge gaps in the contribution of pollinators to yield, which partly result from difficulties in determining area-based estimates of yield effects from insect pollination under field conditions. We have experimentally manipulated
The species richness of flower-visiting insects has declined in past decades, raising concerns that the ecosystem service they provide by pollinating crops and wild plants is threatened. The relative commonness of different species with shared ecological traits can play a pervasive role in determining ecosystem functioning, but information on changes in abundances of pollinators over time is lacki
Agricultural intensification is recognised as a major driver of biodiversity loss in human-modified landscapes. Several agro-environmental measures at different spatial scales have been suggested to mitigate the negative impact of intensification on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The effect of these measures on the functional structure of service-providing communities remains, however, large
